The cliché response when any small plane runs into mechanical trouble in the sky is to land on a public road. A pilot in Texas found out the hard way on Wednesday why this isn’t always the best idea. The pilot put his Piper Navajo down on a highway frontage road in Victoria and rolled straight into a busy intersection, colliding with three ground vehicles. Four people were injured in the multi-modal wreck, with one person airlifted to the hospital.
The pilot was the only person onboard the twin-engine, eight-seater Navajo. The aircraft was flying back and forth in the skies northeast of San Antonio, according to FlightAware. The flight path wasn’t unusual considering a land survey company is the Navajo’s registered owner. The plane took off from Victoria Regional Airport but an as-yet-unknown failure meant it couldn’t make it back to the runway.
Eyewitness saw the Navajo touch down on a frontage road for the Zac Lentz Parkway, roughly a mile from the airport. The pilot didn’t leave himself enough tarmac to get the bird stopped and it carried into an intersection with Mockingbird Lane, the Victoria Advocate reported. It’s not clear how the collision played out, but one car flipped and two others were mangled heaps of metal. The pilot wasn’t one of the four injured and was simply evaluated by first responders.
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the crash. This is just one of the numerous small plane incidents that the agency probes on an annual basis. However, this did have a slightly brighter ending. In 2022, a Cessna slammed head-on into an SUV while attempting to land on a bridge in Miami. One person onboard the plane was killed.